Isaiah 6
1 Cor 15
Luke 5

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I had received: that Christ died for our sins … and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day . … and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve, then to more than five hundred (brothers) … then to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all … he appeared to me. And a few lines down, Paul adds: If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.

If Christ has not been raised, then our faith is in vain. So says Paul two thousand years ago —- and so says the church after him. Still, for some of us, perhaps many of us, with our twenty-first century, enlightenment, even, some say, post-modern minds, this is a hard saying, one we hardly know what to do with, though in the Easter eve, vigil service, when we come out of the candle-lit darkness, and the church lights flash on, we will all shout joyously, “Alleluia. Christ is risen, He is risen indeed. Alleluia!” … So let us talk, and think, you and I, about the resurrection. It’s time —- certainly for me.

And yet, I hesitate. In light of the world-wide problems of our time: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ever present threats of terrorist acts, the devastating earthquake in Haiti, the droughts in Africa, our high unemployment rates, our broken health care system, our rising climate temperatures, in light of all this, and more, is it escapist fantasizing to reflect on a two thousand year old resurrection text? Just a week ago I wrote to a friend, another retired professor with whom I had been in graduate school back in the sixties, telling him that I intend to preach on one of Paul’s resurrection texts and asking him to write me his thoughts on the subject. He responded at once, warning me off the subject of the afterlife, Christ’s or ours, saying that it’s enough to think of the resurrection as Christ’s spirit present in us when we go out to the other in love and justice, demonstrating in our actions concern for their well being. “Is that not life enough,” asked my friend. And he told a story of the Buddha, who when asked by a disciple, do we exist after our death or do we not exist after our death, (the Buddha) answered: “that question profits us not; it does not lead to edification.” To which my friend added: what it does lead to is endless speculation.

Well, our faith is a resurrection faith, so not to talk about it is simply being evasive. Still, my friend’s words are worth heeding: in our resurrection talk, we do need to avoid saying anything that leads to endless speculation and we should say only those things that are edifying to our life of faith. So let us stick to what is basic, and I want to start with the most basic statement of all, which is this: death is as much a part of our life as birth. And just as birth reminds us of all the possibilities of life, creative and tragic ones, joys and sorrows, loves and hates, things that we make and things that we destroy, so death reminds us that our life is only for a time, that there will come a time when life is emptied out of us, that just as we were not, so we will be not. Nothing lies ahead. The great atheistic, existentialist philosophers, the early Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, tell us that our consciousness of death sharpens each moment of our life, that the awareness that life is limited makes each moment more meaningful to us, and that our fear of the nothingness that lies ahead of us can be overcome by taking courage. To which our faith responds: courage to overcome nothingness comes from God, for God’s life, which is eternal life, is the power to overcome nothingness —- and our faith adds one more thing or perhaps it’s better to say our faith asks us one more question: can it be that our fear that nothingness lies ahead of us is unfounded? To which a resurrection faith answers: be assured, your fears are unfounded, what lies ahead of you is eternal life. I cannot say this without thinking of Bonhoeffer’s last words, reported by a friend who was with him at the time of his execution (in April 1945) by the Nazis. Bonhoeffer, many of you will know, was a German pastor and theologian imprisoned for his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler. As he left his prison cell and walked down the steps to his death, he said this: “This is the end —- for me the beginning of life.”

Even now as I say these words there is something in me, some feeling in me, that aches to say, “yes,” to these words, that aches to affirm the faith in these words. But there is another feeling in me, a simultaneous feeling, that stops my mouth, that won’t let it get past the first phrase of Bonhoeffer’s statement: “This is the end.” Perhaps some of you, too, have that double feeling. We ache to affirm; our mouth is stopped. What shall we do with that double feeling? How shall we understand it?

There is a novel, recently published, with the improbable name, “36 Arguments for the Existence of God.” The lead character in the novel, a philosopher named Seltzer, writes a book listing thirty-six arguments for God’s existence —- and refuting each one of them. One of those arguments is the argument from insignificance. It goes like this. In a million years or two million or for all we know in two thousand years, nothing that happens now will matter. It is intolerable, existentially impossible, to think that everything that matters will come to not matter, as if everything were nothing, as if everything never happened. Only the existence of an eternal God can assure eternal significance to temporal events. Therefore, God must exist. The corollary to this argument pertains to our concerns regarding eternal life. It is intolerable, existentially impossible, to think that in a million or a thousand or for all we know in a hundred years our lives and the lives of those we love, which mean so much to us, will not mean anything at all; in fact, it will be as if none of our lives ever were. Only eternal life for every existent being can resolve this existentially intolerable situation. In the novel, the philosopher, Seltzer, dismisses this type of argument for God and, by extension, for eternal life, as falling victim to “the fallacy of wishful thinking” —- which is to say that the only basis for either argument lies in our wishes, our desires, our dreams, and that wishes and desires and dreams do not create reality.

I think we all understand Seltzer’s dismissal of an argument based on wishes and desires. For Seltzer, like all of us, feel the constraints of modern science upon our thinking. Science for us not only informs us about the nature of reality, it tends to set the conditions for what is possible and what is impossible in reality. So here we are, people of faith, caught in the cross hairs of our double feelings, having on the one hand the constraints of science regarding what is possible, and on the other hand we have our wishes, our desires, our dreams … for what appears impossible. And now we have come upon not the end, as some might think, and others might fear, but upon the crucial question, which is this: Is there anything that can be said for the impossible, for these wishes and desires of ours for something to be possible which appears to us to be beyond possibility? Specifically, given the Pauline text that is before us this morning, is there anything that can be said for the resurrection of Christ and our resurrection, or rather, to put it a little more positively, what can be said about the resurrection, since as soon as we think about it, it seems beyond possibility.

Bear with me now for I need to introduce a distinction that’s a little academic but will be useful to us: let us, from here on, use the word “impossible” to refer to what cannot be, and use the phrase “beyond possibility” to refer to what lies beyond the horizon of our knowledge, and will always lie beyond the horizon of our knowledge, to that place where knowledge fails us, and where all we have to go on is our faith. So our question is this: can we think of our resurrection faith as referring not to the impossible but to what lies beyond possibility, to what lies out there, in the future, unknown, yet coming to us, a wish beyond our wishes, a desire beyond our desires. We can if we are willing to let go of what is impossible and to allow what is beyond possibility to break through the horizon of our knowledge. In doing so, in letting go of the impossible, we will be letting go of some old dogmas, old notions, old beliefs of the resurrection, not discounting them —- for they are affirmations of our faith in the risen Christ —- but reaching beyond them, so that the resurrection seems to us as something we believe in but can see only darkly, sense only dimly, and certainly cannot conceptualize. If we do this we can avoid the endless, and futile, speculations that my friend from my graduate school days so fears, and perhaps, also, say something edifying to our life in faith.

But is it possible to give up some of our old notions, for example, of the risen Christ eating fish with the disciples or inviting Thomas to touch his wounded hands, without giving up something that is essential to our resurrection faith? It is possible if —- and this is a very big “if” —- we let Paul be our guide here or, rather, if we let Paul’s epistles be the decisive authority on the resurrection appearances. This may strike us as a little odd until we remember that Paul’s letters are the earliest of church documents, written twenty years or so after the death of Christ, while the gospels were written anywhere from thirty-five to sixty years after Christ’s death. Also, of all the New Testament writers, Paul is the only one to have experienced the risen Christ. So let us look at Paul’s resurrection language. In this morning’s lectionary text, he confines himself to the word, appearance. Christ appeared first to Peter, then appeared to the twelve, then appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters, and “last of all he appeared to (Paul).” Further down in the same chapter of the epistle, Paul writes that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom” and then he uses the phrase “spiritual body” to describe the nature of what is raised. In the letter to the Galatians, where Paul speaks of his experience of the risen Christ, an experience Luke famously describes decades later in elaborate and conflicting detail in (two accounts in) the Book of Acts, Paul in his own account confines himself to saying that God “was pleased to reveal his Son to me.” — [Only one more time does Paul refer to his experience, and that is in 1 Cor 9 where he writes, “ Have I not seen Christ the Lord?”]— All this is restrained, modest language. It is as if Paul is trying to avoid the language of impossibility, such as flesh and blood inheriting the kingdom, and confining himself to language which is redemptive but is vague and can only be dimly understood. For example, do any of us have a clear idea of what a spiritual body is? Is this not a desire, so unknown to us, so open ended, that it is a desire beyond our desires?

Now I know only too well that nothing that one person says or preaches about faith is ever sufficient to convince another person. The decision for faith is always one’s own decision made in solitude. Still before I go I would like to say one more thing about that decision which may prove helpful. Many of us sometimes say to ourselves, “Oh, if only I could experience the risen Christ as Paul and the disciples did, or if I could see and hear the Lord as Isaiah describes in this morning’s Old Testament reading or if I could speak with God as did Jeremiah and Elijah and Moses, then all my doubts would fly away and my faith would be strong and certain.” When we think this way, we are forgetting one thing. We are forgetting that Paul and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Elijah and even Moses have to ask themselves, “How do I know that the one who speaks to me and the one I see is really the Lord God and not some other reality or phantasm?” How do they, how does anybody, go about answering that question? Let me tell you a story and then I’ll be through.

This is the story of a young man, a graduate student in English literature, who got confused about who he was and things he had done, things that he greatly regretted, things that so troubled him that late at night when he was too tired to study any more, instead of going to bed, he would walk the streets, filled with self recriminations. On one of these late night walks, he came upon a large church with a brightly lit cross on its roof and its double doors bathed in light. The young man ran up the stone stairs of the church, convinced the doors would open and that he would find consolation sitting in the pews. With his two hands he grabbed the handles of both doors, but they would not move. The young man walked slowly away and as he walked he heard footsteps behind him, he began to walk faster, and the footsteps behind him speeded up, he began to run and then the footsteps were upon him. He looked up, filled with fear … and saw the head of Christ, who spoke to him and said, “You are forgiven,” and then disappeared though his presence remained felt. The young man, previously a very rational unbeliever, felt healing flow through him and he became a believer in Christ’s redemptive power, and thought that the doubts of faith would never trouble him. And that was true for a while. Of course, it was not long before he acknowledged to himself that there was a perfectly reasonable psychological explanation of his experience, and so he had to decide, in solitude, for no one else could decide for him, whether his vision was that of a phantasm stirred up by the inner dynamics of his psyche or whether it was, indeed, the risen Christ. The experience could not make the decision for him. He had to decide whether to interpret the experience in faith or whether to interpret it in unfaith.

Sisters and brothers in Christ, is that not how it is for all of us, whether we have personally experienced the living Christ or not. Religious experiences, even the most awesome of them, whether ours or someone else’s, do not in themselves decide upon their authenticity. We have to decide whether to interpret them in faith or in unfaith, just as we have to decide whether those desires of ours which reach beyond possibility arise out of a fear of ultimate nothingness or out of our openness to a reality that we can only sense dimly, uncertainly. How we answer that question will determine whether, like Bonhoeffer, we will be able to say, “This is the end, for me the beginning of life.” Or perhaps it will be enough, as Paul suggests, if, on this matter, all we can do in our prayers is “groan inwardly as we wait.” Yes, certainly, that will be enough.

Praise God for this grace.
Praise Christ.
Amen.

Sermon preached by Burton Cooper
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, Vt.